PicoBlog

Thirty years ago, Anthony Hopkins starred in Shadowlands, a movie about the romance between C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman Gresham.

Now, he’s starring in another movie about C.S. Lewis… but this time, instead of playing Lewis himself, he’s playing Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.

The film is called Freud’s Last Session, and it’s an adaptation of a play by Mark St Germain that imagines a fictitious meeting between Freud and Lewis, the latter of whom is played this time by Matthew Goode (Downton Abbey, etc.).

I am unfamiliar with the play, but this is how Variety describes the film:

“Freud’s Last Session” is set on the eve of the Second World War, when at the end of his life, Freud (Hopkins) invites “The Chronicles of Narnia” author C.S. Lewis (Goode) to debate the existence of God. Interweaving past, present and fantasy, the film explores Freud’s unique relationship with his daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries), and Lewis’ unconventional relationship with his best friend’s mother.

So, not exactly “Tell me about your mother,” but “Tell me about your friend’s mother”…?

For what it’s worth, Freud died on September 23, 1939—just a little more than three weeks after the war began—so he was definitely at the end of his life when this movie takes place. (Freud was 83 when he died; Hopkins is currently 85.)

Lewis, for his part, had only just started to become a well-known writer when this movie takes place; Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in his space trilogy, came out one year earlier, in 1938, but most of his most famous works still lay in the future—and that includes the Narnia books, which did not start coming out until 1950. (Lewis was a few months shy of 41 when the war began; Goode is currently 45.)

So this film will be able to look back at Freud’s entire life and work, but it’s going to have to be a bit more creative when it comes to Lewis. It can’t just cite his most famous works as though they already exist; it will have to imagine what his thoughts were like at this earlier stage of their development, before he wrote them down.

I’m not exactly a Lewis scholar or anything like that, so I don’t know what, if anything, Lewis might have said about Freud in his writings (aside, perhaps, from a passing comment about “some aspects of Psychoanalysis” in The Screwtape Letters, which just may be the book I have read most often outside of certain parts of the Bible).

I do, however, remember that the Anthony Hopkins version of Lewis in Shadowlands made a dismissive comment about a friend’s “hand-me-down Freudianism” when the friend probed him on the meaning of the fur coats in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Anyway. The producers released the first official image from Freud’s Last Session today, so I figured I’d pass it along. I assume they’re planning to get the film out there by the end of the year, for awards season, but no release date has been announced yet.

As ever, more details later, when they arrive.

Related links:

• In the early days of my first blog—between 2005 and 2008—I kept a detailed list of my writings about the “Inklings” (i.e. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their friends) and the movies that had been based on their books.

• My review of The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis (2021).

• This doesn’t really have anything to do with Lewis, but it’s kind of Lewis-adjacent, or Hopkins-as-Lewis-adjacent: in 1999, I got to interview Sir Richard Attenborough, who directed Hopkins as Lewis in Shadowlands. We mostly spoke about Attenborough’s then-new film Grey Owl, though.

• My review of The Two Popes (2019), which also doesn’t really have anything to do with Lewis, but it’s another film based on a play about religion-themed conversations between two famous people, one of whom is played by Hopkins, so… it’s kind of in the same ballpark as Freud’s Last Session, maybe…?

ncG1vNJzZmiolamys8DCoZitrJGsrrp60q6ZrKyRmLhvr86mZqlnkaPBqbvNsmShp6Cgtq%2B%2FjKyrmqqjYravecCnpq2glac%3D